Palmore Leads Southampton Girls To Win Over Pierson, but Then Injures Ankle

As her head coach, Richard “Juni” Wingfield, likes to say, “As Daelyn Palmore goes, so do the Mariners” — and this past week was a perfect example.

Palmore was unstoppable in leading the Southampton girls basketball team to a 46-33 victory over Pierson/Bridgehampton in Sag Harbor on Thursday, December 12. She scored a game-high 26 points, which doesn’t sound so dominating, but she got some help offensively from some teammates, something the Mariners have been searching for desperately. Senior Mya Halsey scored eight points, junior Maggie Glanz scored six points, and senior Mia Arnold and sophomore Melanie Feliciano each scored three points.

It was a big turnaround from Southampton’s very first game of the season at Eastport-South Manor, when Palmore scored 31 of her team’s 34 points, Wingfield noted.

“That was a very good game for us,” he said of last week’s win. “We played well that game, and we played good defense against a very good Pierson team. At the end of the day, defense is really the thing that has to be our personality, even though we’re not a very good man-to-man defensive team, but we’re really working hard on our zone.”

The good, and Palmore’s fantastic start to her senior season, was short-lived.

In the first minute of a home game against Mattituck on Saturday, Palmore rushed over to one of the wings to help a teammate on defense, lunged forward and came down awkwardly on a player’s foot, twisting her ankle. Fortunately, it was not the ankle that she had injured nearly 10 days earlier at Riverhead, and after getting checked out on Monday, it’s not fractured or broken, Wingfield said. But Palmore will be in a boot the next several days and will miss the next two weeks.

After keeping up with Mattituck that first quarter, fighting “tooth-and-nail,” as Wingfield put it, the Mariners simply couldn’t keep up with the Tuckers, leading to a 48-33 loss.

“Right after she goes out, what does Mattituck do? They press us. Why? Because Daelyn is so good with the ball, they have to respect her in the press. If they don’t, she just gets behind the defender and rushes the ball up the court and scores,” Wingfield explained.

“In the girls game, you’re only as good as your best ballhandler, whether it’s zone or man. And in our league, all you really need is one or two people to handle the ball. But Daelyn is currently our only ballhandler. Someday that will be Faith Mack, but she’s only a seventh-grader.”

Wingfield added, “Necessity is the mother of invention” — and with that, Mack is going to be thrown to the fire this week and will be getting some increased playing time with Palmore out. After having played Center Moriches on Tuesday and hosting East Hampton on Thursday, the Mariners have over two weeks off before their next game on January 6, at which time Palmore may be ready to return.

Southampton is 2-1 in League VII play thus far, 2-4 overall. The team has already doubled its win total from last season. Still, Wingfield expected to have four wins going into the holiday break. It may be hard to achieve that now with Palmore out, he said, but the team just needs to keep working.

“The thing most detrimental to us that you can see at times is that we’re hampered by the level of skill development,” he said. “Those are skills that you come by as a youngster — you play continuously and get some other instruction, and get past some of those things at a young age. But we have players who are getting through those things now and are playing catch-up.”

Meanwhile, for the aforementioned Whalers, they got off the schneid on Saturday, picking up a 47-40 victory at Smithtown Christian and snapping their four-game losing streak to start the season. Head coach John “Woody” Kneeland did not respond to phone calls seeking comment on the start of the season.

Pierson/Bridgehampton will host Mattituck this Thursday, December 19, at 6:15 p.m. before having over two weeks off until its next game on January 6.